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Space Biologist Searches for Germs on Mars

Adrienne Kish, an astrobiologist at the Université Paris-Sud, is an old hand at hunting life-forms in inhospitable environments. As a 21-year-old intern at the Kennedy Space Center in 2001, Kish volunteered to extract effluent from the "volume F wet trash" of space shuttle missions — food scraps, astronaut diapers, and vomit bags — to learn what kind of microbes might be growing in the muck.

She has since turned her exotic dumpster-diving into a profession. Last summer Kish took her bacterial expertise to Svalbard, a glacier-covered archipelago midway between Norway and the North Pole, as one of 35 scientists testing instruments and protocols for upcoming Mars missions. "We used Svalbard as an analogue for the Martian environment," she says. "They're similar in many ways." Given that a round trip to our planetary neighbor might cost $10 billion, NASA wants to do as much preparation as possible. While studying the hardy microbial life of the Arctic for clues to how and where life might exist on Mars, Kish also helped devise a strategy for selecting samples to bring home for closer examination. If the effort succeeds, some lucky intern may someday get to sort through the wet trash of a mission to the Red Planet.